EXCLUSIVE: 20th Century Studios is eyeing a Choose Your Own Adventure movie, based on the long-running interactive book series, with Radio Silence (Ready or Not franchise) on board to direct and produce.
Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett will work from a script by Tom Bissell, a WGA Award winner with credits including Andor and The Disaster Artist. No details yet as to the plot of the feature take.
One of the major literary phenomena of the late 20th century, Choose Your Own Adventure comprises a series of “gamebooks,” nonlinear, replayable, and user-directed stories, in which readers are the hero and decide how the story ends.
The series officially launched at Bantam Books in 1979 with The Cave of Time, a book by Edward Packard, who had ideated a novel branching-story concept while telling bedtime stories to his daughters. Between 1997 and 1999, more than 184 of these gamebooks were published from 30 different authors, with stories set everywhere from the ocean to outer space and myriad fantasy worlds. R. A. Montgomery was instrumental in setting the series up at Bantam at a time when the company was launching a division focused on younger readers and became one of its primary authors. In 2003, he and author wife Shannon Gilligan took over as the series’ publisher via Chooseco, which says the series sold over 250 million copies worldwide in its original run, with translations in 38 languages, and is the fourth bestselling of all time in the arena of children’s books.
Choose Your Own Adventure has had an enduring cultural impact, as a series at the vanguard of interactive storytelling, with Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch being one of the most notable recent projects implementing this basic framework to break into the mainstream.
Radio Silence’s film will be the first major take on the books for the screen. Responsible for the cult Searchlight horror film Ready or Not, starring Samara Weaving, they’e coming off the release of its sequel and are next set to tackle an anticipated new installment in The Mummy franchise for Universal, with stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz returning. Radio Silence also recently helmed both the reboot of Scream and Scream VI for Paramount and Spyglass, which together delivered $304 million worldwide, as well as the Uni horror flick Abigail. They are represented by CAA, Brillstein Entertainment Partners, and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.
Bissell is a prolific, multiple award-winning writer working across TV, film, books, journalism, and video games, whose prior experience with interactive storytelling made him a natural fit for this assignment. Bissell has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories three times and is the author of 11 books, including the New York Times bestseller The Disaster Artist, chronicling the creation of The Room, a film that has been referred to as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.”
On the screenwriting front, Bissell co-created the Apple TV+ series The Mosquito Coast, which ran for two seasons, and most recently received a WGA Award nomination for his work on the second season of Andor, for which he wrote the final three episodes. Bissell’s video game work includes the fourth and fifth installments of Gears of War, as well as Uncharted 4, for which he won a WGA Award. He is represented by CAA, Entertainment 360, and Yorn Levine.
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